I’d heard of the mythical and mysterious “girls’ trip” but it had never happened to me and I kind of assumed it never would – until it did. I was in the courtyard at Prague Castle when I got the message: “Hey, are you interested in going on a mini break? We’re thinking somewhere warm and somewhere cheap”. Yes, I absolutely am!
Girls’ trips have a bit of a reputation for not making it out of the group chat, hence the tag for this one, but by the end of the day we’d settled on dates we could all do and found a location. We’d booked the flights within 36 hours of that first message – the only reason we waited that long being that I was at an airport waiting for a gate to be announced and didn’t fancy my attempt at booking a flight being interrupted (anyway, that’s a laptop job, not a phone job!) and Catherine was away from home without her passport handy. In fact, the whole thing, from the initial message to finding dates to booking flights and accommodation to getting on the plane was just thirty-two days which is surely record-breaking efficiency for a girls’ trip.
Let me introduce at this point our three characters. There’s me. I’m easy, this is my blog, you can get to know me. There’s Esther, my best friend since we started school aged four. And there’s Catherine who joined our group at thirteen. I’ve done a couple of school trips with each of them, I’ve stayed with Esther at her home in Stockholm and I went to Birmingham with Catherine just before Christmas. But the only time we’ve been anywhere together, all three of us, was on the year 11 school trip to Spain when we were fifteen or so. Coincidentally, our destination, guided by cheap flights on the right dates from our local airports was also Spain, and specifically Málaga.
There was a certain amount of “what’s everyone else thinking?” in the group chat when it came to things like accommodation and eating while we were planning. Suddenly there are three people’s preferences, tolerances and budgets to take into consideration instead of just my own. Catherine likes heat and sun, revelling in the beach, dressing up a bit and having the occasional glass of wine. Esther tends more towards the cooler end of the temperature scale (hard to live in Sweden if you don’t) and would prefer to just have a break from cooking and cleaning and the day-to-day responsibilities of having three children. I prefer the cold and have a compulsion to make the most of my limited time in a place I’m probably not going to come back to. Spain is a country I would never have chosen on my own.
We settled on a three-bedroom apartment with acceptable reviews which seemed the best on our shortlist of “cheap but not too far out of town” three-bedroom apartments and we were delighted with it! It definitely deserves better reviews and I’ll give it one as soon as the €250 security deposit comes safely back. Three double bedrooms, so no “who gets the single bed and why is it always the one single person?”, fishbowl-like floor-to-ceiling windows in the spacious living room, two bathrooms (ok, one was pretty impractical if you had legs or elbows or wanted the shower water to fall on you rather than straight out of the window) and enough kitchen to do some cooking if we wanted to.
As for the food, were we going to escape domestic labour by eating out or save money by cooking at home? I’m the spanner in this particular engine because I have an eating disorder called ARFID but what I lack in ability to eat, I make up for in willingness to go along with everyone else and an interest in at least looking at the food. We ended up breakfasting on supermarket brand cereal, picked up empanadas and pastries for lunch (I discovered cuatro quesos empanadas and they were great!) and we mostly had tapas in the evenings, which I only really knew from Mr Warbis, our year 9 Spanish teacher, describing it as “lid food”.
So that was the two immediately-obvious easily-answerable questions answered. But what about actually being in Málaga? What were we going to do? What would it be like? How were we going to divide up the money? Could our very long-standing friendship survive living together for four days?
Well, we came home all still talking (although at time of writing, the group chat has been very quiet!) which is a minor triumph. We’re all easygoing enough – I suspect Catherine tolerated my demand to go to the cathedral, I tolerated Catherine’s demand to go to the Picasso museum and Esther probably tolerated both of our demands to go out and about in Málaga rather than ever relax in the apartment before about 11pm. We did some shopping “for the house” which included some stuff for each of us individually which came out to a similar cost each, we split the meals and then we made a final payment to Catherine afterwards to more or less even it up, because we’re far too old to quibble over “Well, I didn’t eat any of that” or “you used 10% of my suncream” or “I didn’t have any wine”. We paid separately for entrance fees and transport and sun lounger hire and empanadas and it worked out fine.
For me, it was having my day skewed two to four hours later that was odd. I start to feel twitchy if I’m not out by 9.30am, like I’m wasting the day, but the others prefer not to be up, or even conscious, by then. On the other hand, because our days were happening later in the day, as it were, and because Spain eats so much later in the day than we’re used to, the days were just as long as I’m used to, just later, and we went out to eat in the evenings. I’m rarely out past 10pm these days but in Málaga, sometimes we were only just getting tapas or finding tonight’s bar by 10pm. Then we’d come home, switch on the fairy lights in the trees in the living room, throw back the white gauzy curtains and sit in our fishbowl in the dark, enjoying the views and talking about life, ageing parents, children, childbirth, husbands, memories, boys, tapas and anything else that came to mind after midnight in Málaga. We had a few revelations – among other things, I’d never really realised I saw Esther and Catherine very differently as teenagers to how they saw themselves and it turns out I didn’t really notice I’d been “betrayed” over a boy when we were sixteen or seventeen. If anyone vanished, we sort of assumed they’d gone for a bit of quiet time in their rooms and didn’t bother them; if one preferred to sit in the wicker chairs overlooking the square rather than on the sofa, we didn’t attempt to move the conversation to drag them in; if someone was reading, we’d talk about them or read or scroll quietly too. No, life in the apartment was pretty easy.
I did a bit of reading on what a girls’ trip is supposed to involve. We skipped the coordinated outfits, the “signature drinks”, the curated playlist, the spa day, the pool day, the crafternoon and I’m not sure we’re quite 2020s enough to have taken “the opportunity for connection, self-care and empowerment“. We’re not 20-somethings treating Málaga as a sunny backdrop for drinking, dancing and debauchery. We’re adults with busy lives and responsibilities who value a certain amount of sleep. We definitely did have moments of reverting to being teenagers again, but we were teenagers who carried first aid kits, washed up their breakfast dishes without needing to be asked and sent pictures back to husbands designed to convince them of the merits of a wife on a Mediterranean holiday. There were plenty of triple selfies and quite a few “can you take a picture of me??”but otherwise, we were mostly sensible grown-ups.
The only thing that slightly concerned me was that I knew I’d be writing it all up. It’s one thing writing about something I experienced solo but I know my point of view is going to be different to Esther and Catherine’s. That’s the nature of being three separate humans. Are they going to read these posts and think “That’s not how I experienced it at all” or “Was that really what she was thinking all that time?”? Catherine shared a few pictures on Instagram Stories and I kind of never got round to that but I also wasn’t sure whether this trip was the kind to put all over social media – there are other people involved! Do they really want to be splashed all over my Stories? Do they want to see my thoughts and opinions on social media in real time? And so I guess this is the blog post out of the entire series that is going to be most filled with thoughts and opinions and share the most of my companions, the one where I’m going to hold my breath when I post the link. Oh, they’ll appear in the rest of the posts – it’s going to be almost impossible to write five or six blogs about a girls’ trip without mentioning the girls but unless they read this and specifically demand a starring role, it’ll be more comfortable for all concerned if they more or less stay as cameos.
So that’s it. I overthought the whole thing quite a lot in the two or three weeks leading up to the trip and in the end, there was very little to “survive”. We had a good trip, we’re all still friends, we’re talking about the possibility of doing another sometime and over the next couple of weeks, I’ll take you through everything we did, which will include the must-dos in Málaga, our itinerary and our feelings towards the city we made our home for four days.
I Am A Polar Bear 